WASHINGTON – A congressional report finds that Hezbollah fundraising
cells are rampant across the United States and that the Lebanese
organization could activate these cells to carry out lethal terrorist
attacks.

The report, compiled under the aegis of the US House Committee on
Homeland Security, estimates that there are several thousand
sympathetic Hezbollah donors in the country, with operatives probably
in the hundreds.

Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy, and should Iran want to carry out
terrorism in the US, it could then do so through these operatives.
Though many in the US intelligence community assumed after September
11 that Tehran would only use Hezbollah for attacks inside America
should the US or Israel strike Iran’s nuclear sites, that thinking
changed following the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi
Arabia’s ambassador in Washington.

“It is no longer clear that Iran sees carrying out an attack in the
United States as crossing some sort of red line,” according to
Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and
Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He
testified before the committee Wednesday at a hearing on the threat
that Iran and Hezbollah pose to America.

“Hezbollah has long had a substantial base of supporters in North
America,” he noted in his prepared testimony. “This includes some
operatives with military and operational training and a much larger
pool of sympathizers and supporters who provide funding and some
logistical support to the group but could be called upon to support
operational activity should the group decide to carry out an attack
here.”

Levitt calculated that such a decision became more likely if the
organization perceived that the US was directly targeting or seeking
to undermine the group.

And he concluded that “the odds are very strong that in the event of
an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, Hezbollah would retaliate.”

In addition to the possibility that it would launch rockets at
Israel, he assessed “its worldwide networks would almost certainly be
called upon to execute the kind of asymmetric terror attacks that can
be carried out with reasonable deniability and therefore make a
targeted response more difficult.”

Committee chairman Peter King (R-New York), however, said that the
heightened threat of retaliation on the American homeland even from
an Israeli attack doesn’t mean the military option should be taken
off the table.

“I don’t think we can rule out an Israeli attack,” King told CNN
ahead of the hearing. “I think we have to keep all the pressure out
there.”